Zombies to the left of me. Zombies to the right of me. Zombies fucking everywhere, man! The resort island of Banoi is crawling with zombies! But thankfully I’ve got a Tijauana Machete strapped to a car battery, and they’ve got such squishy heads. Wave after wave of the undead are struck down by my mighty weapons and awesome throwing arm, but Dead Island is far from a perfect game – even though killing zombies is one of my favorite past times.

That’s where I’m a viking!

Dead Island is messy, more than a little annoying and the only real joy is just having another co-op game to play with my friends. There are a lot of good aspects to the game, like the large maps and the skill trees, but those are overshadowed by the fact that the basic act of killing zombies can be so damn frustrating!

Zombies literally are everywhere. It’s been a very popular game genre for the past several years. I’m already a huge fan of Left 4 Dead and Dead Rising. And that’s not even counting games like Red Dead Redemption, a cowboy game that had a zombie spin-off just for the lulz. Apparently the word ‘dead’ is key to zombie franchises, even though most of these games involve some kind of virus that turns people into zombies as opposed to corpses coming back to life. But still, Dead Island is throwing its hat into a very crowded ring, and already that counts against it.

Whatever scary atmosphere Dead Island was trying to create is diffused right off the bat by the fact that Left 4 Dead did it better, and I’ve already mastered Left 4 Dead. So Dead Island has to try and win me over on gameplay and style.

It does not succeed.

Yes, I had fun playing, but that was mostly because I liked having a new co-op game to play with my friends.

Dead Island puts zombies into an open-world RPG. You play one of four characters, each with their own weapon specialties and skill trees, tasked with completing various quests and side quests in the large, open world of Banoi. The more zombies you kill and the more quests you complete, the more XP you get. And as you level up, you get to put skill points into various perks and attributes. Maybe you want to focus on combat and increase your damage, or maybe you’ll pick the survival skill tree and increase your inventory space or health regeneration.

My character, Logan, had an alcohol problem. So one perk he could get was to heal when he’s drunk. But one bottle of alcohol will turn the world into a kaleidoscope slathered with Vaseline, so he was pretty useless. Funny though.

Dead Island doesn’t really do anything new with leveling up your character, so it’s pretty standard.

But it’s also the game’s biggest problem: the zombies level up right alongside you.

If on your journey you should encounter zombies, zombies will be cut

No matter how strong you become. No matter how much your health increases with each level. The zombies will always be the same comparative difficulty, whether you’re level 1 or level 50. I find that very frustrating.

It doesn’t matter that you have 10 health squares if a zombie can still kill you in two hits, just like it did when you had 4 health squares. It doesn’t matter that you can now do 1,000 damage with each hit if the zombie’s own health has increased to compensate. Leveling your character doesn’t matter because you will never level high enough to be more powerful than the zombies. I always thought that was the point of leveling, to make yourself stronger. To make it easier to fight the zombies.

But it never gets easier, it never gets better. Zombies everywhere stay the same level as you, so it’s not like you’ll find lower level zombies at the starting levels and tougher zombies deeper into the game. They’re all the same difficulty. And fighting zombies in Dead Island is very frustrating and very annoying.  No matter how much fun I had playing with my girlfriend Alyssa, I was getting very annoyed more than I was having fun. The zombies were just too ‘in your face’.

Zombie - to the X-TREEEEEEME!!!

Fighting zombies is a very ugly affair in Dead Island. There’s no precision, no real skill involved. It’s melee-focused, since guns are almost entirely useless against the zombies. You’re left haphazardly swinging your blades and clubs, hoping to hit the speedy, chaotic zombies. Sometimes the zombies are the slow, shuffling types. And sometimes they’re the fast, violent models. Either group is hard to hit when they’re all around you, killing you in two hits.

Adding to the frustration is that the game limits your endurance and it disables your weapons very quickly. You can only swing your samurai sword or sledgehammer so many times before you get tired and can’t swing it anymore, leaving you vulnerable to the speedy zombies. And every swing degrades your weapon quality, lowering its damage. So while you’re struggling to swing a slow-moving, badly damaged hammer, the zombie’s already hit you twice at a faster speed and killed you.

I don’t like dying in video games.

Yet I'm not about to turn the gun on myself

The game tries to make up for this by having you respawn right away. That’s helpful, but it takes away any and all realism. In Left 4 Dead, you got one life and that was it as you tried to survive the zombie hordes. That meant surviving was an actual accomplishment. In Dead Island, you’re killed quickly and come back just as quickly…only to die again because those same zombies are still there. A lot of times, especially in the final boss fight, I felt like all I was doing was hurling my body against the zombies again and again until I’d finally died enough times that they were gone. That’s not how I want to play a video game.

One neat little mechanic they added was throwing your weapons. If you’re armed to the teeth with knives and cleavers, you can hurl them at zombies and retrieve them later. It was fun, and it was my character’s specialty. The only problem is, with powerful zombies, it takes multiple throws and multiple weapons. Meaning there’s a good chance you’ll run out and your hands will be empty with zombies still coming after you. Plus if you die and you’ve tossed away all your best, fully tricked-out weapons, there’s a chance you may lose them. Not cool.

And since the zombies stay the same level as you, I never got to enjoy just running around killing weaker level zombies in one throw. Total waste.

Zombies in bikinis are not hot

So as far as I’m concerned, Dead Island wasn’t very fun. I enjoyed playing alongside my friend, but I couldn’t imagine playing it solo. If you’re going to play Dead Island, make sure you play it with multiplayer.

There’s no story to speak of, at least not really. You play one of four characters from different walks of life, and all of whom have found themselves at the resort where the outbreak occurs. None of these characters matter. They don’t go through any sort of character growth or have any sort of individual story. There are cutscenes that feature all the characters, but they do not support you in the game. They may as well be blank slates. They never make any significant connections with each other or the player.

That's T-Pain...or Yo, Dawg...or Paul. I don't remember his rapper name

The open world is fun, at least, and great to look at. Unfortunately, I don’t have an HDTV, so it wasn’t as beautiful as it could have been or was intended to be. You play on the island of Banoi, which has four chapters: Resort, Slums, Jungle and Prison. All are pretty cool, especially the resort. You spend the most time there, the first level, exploring the different swimming pools, bungalows, the beach and the small town nearby. Made me want to go on a tropical vacation. The slums are basically just one big city with similar looking streets and alleys. The jungle is cool too, and the prison is just a prison.

There’s an underlying story that a guy based at the prison is going to help you escape, but it’s such a flimsy little story and he’s barely a character. You meet a bunch of other survivors in various safe houses throughout the game. They give you your quests.

But…SPOILER ALERT…you leave them behind in the end without any mention. And a character who is key to the finale only shows up like a quest or two prior to the end. Then all of a suddenly he’s a big deal. Where the hell did he come from? It’s kind of weird.

There are no decisions to make, no branching storylines, nothing to really warrant a replay. You just go from quest to quest killing zombies in the most frustrating way possible. Dead Island has some fun quirks, like leveling up and building cooler weapons, but those are not enough to sustain and otherwise uninspired game.

Which is too bad, because the trailer was awesome.